Reduce bounce rate, improve CTR by changing link colors

If you observe carefully, you’ll notice that all Google’s online products have blue color hyperlinks. Google is not the only internet company to use this color for hyperlinks. Facebook and Microsoft Bing uses it too.

As most of the people use the search engine frequently or social networking websites, they know very well that text in the blue is clickable. More clicks = high CTR, with this logic, I did a little experiment on one of my site to reduce bounce rate and improve internal links click through rate. The result of my experiments proved to be useful for my website.

I noticed a 30% increase in click through rate and 10% decrease in bounce rate on my site. If you have a site that suffers from the low CTR and the poor user engagement problem, then you can do the same experiment on your website.

Why did I perform the experiment?

One of my sites has 1000+ unique visitors per day and Google Analytics showed 80 to 85% (on an average) bounce rate for it. This means that users ignored all the internal and the sidebar popular post links that were added to keep them engaged. I needed to find a solution for this ignorance, and as search engines consider these two rates to rank a website, I had no other option.

Color picker from W3Schools: Well, the internet has a lot of useful tools, and the color picker is one of them. It allows the user to generate hex color code quickly online. Your stylesheet should have code something like this:

a {
color: #eb2121;
}

If it doesn’t have such code, then you haven’t stylized your website hyperlinks yet. Add this code to the CSS file and save the file to turn all your plain links to red colored. The code will make the links look more compelling than it was before. In the above snippet, the alphanumeric value after the # sign is the color code. I replaced this value with the hex value I used to get with the tool.